It wasn’t just the opening that sucked bullets. Many things at these Olympics have gone wrong. Athletes are housed in miserable conditions that have prompted at least one of them to sleep in the park:
The cardboard beds have been a huge point of contention for the athletes in Paris, with many complaining they’re too hard and not conducive to a good night’s sleep. The beds are designed to be environmentally friendly and can be re-used after the Games, but the athletes hate them.
I hope the beds are reused to make the entire organizing committee sleep on them for a month.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m not watching the Olympics either, after the tasteless opening ceremony. I’ve heard of the complaints by athletes, another complaint is that much of the food is terrible with lots of vegan options but little good meat, garbage like BeyondMeat which is chemical junk. You would think the Olympic Committee would want the athletes to be comfortable as possible, but they’re more concerned with virtue signaling than actually taking care of the athletes
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One has to be all sorts of nuts to give fake meat to athletes.
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Or any sort of human consumption, fake meat is disgusting with all sorts of chemicals. I understand some people are vegan for different reasons, but there’s plenty of tasty vegetarian dishes that don’t use animal products. But that would mean cooking and eating a lot of curries or pasta dishes that don’t look like familiar American food and may be spicy, eating fake meat is pointless since it’s worse than actual meat
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This feels like a controlled demolition. Like the word’s gone out: Olympics are done, pack it up, it’s time to scrap the whole show. Sponsors not feeling it anymore, whatever.
Just make it look like it’s the fault of “haters” and not a looming economic crash and an elite that’re no longer invested in public spectacles for the masses.
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…Like, run the Olympics through everything you’ve previously said about austerity and the ending of public subsidies for the middle class. I think the shoe fits.
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Absolutely. The Olympics are a nation-state game. Once the nation-state weakens, the need to shore up national pride is gone, and this is the result.
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The most successful sports are typically club sports like football, where teams have their own stadium and dedicated supporters who always watch their local team. For the world cup they can just use the club stadiums.
The Olympics are difficult because you have to build a bunch of one-off facilities you are never going to use again. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone willing to host them.
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That’s what makes me wonder: did the higher-ups just decide they didn’t want to do it anymore?
Personally, I’d love to see pretty much all sports go back to being more local things– we still had company softball and bowling teams when I was a kid. The sort of thing where all the competitors have day jobs, maybe you know some of them, and it’s a fun gathering.
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The link in the post doesn’t work. I googled to find it:
https://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics-embarrassment-gold-medallist-spotted-sleeping-in-park-as-athletes-fall-ill-after-seine-swim-235937189.html
Read about bad food and athletes falling ill after swallowing dirty water in Russian blogs, but thought it was Putin’s propaganda.
This appeared on Russian blogs too. Looks like they don’t publish only lies and this feeling is pretty widespread.
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The law of effective propaganda: 40% of truth, 60% of lies.
The law of very effective propaganda: 85% of truth, 15% of lies.
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Usually, in Russian pro-Putin blogs it’s maximum 30% truth.
To be honest, I cannot see anything re Olympics as a huge problem in Western countries after
– days of checking updates re the predicted timing of Iranian attack and the possibility of a large regional war with Israel bombing Iranian nuclear sites.
– days of following Russian news and seeing how it turns into North Corea faster than I could’ve imagined. After slowing down YouTube, they passed 10 additional restrictions on Internet use, among them:
In the latest surreal news from Russia:
Против разработчика законодательства об «иноагентах» возбуждено дело о его неисполнении
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North Korea, sorry
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It’s Corea in Spanish, so I’m fine.
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The thing is, when you stub your toe, that hurts more than a stranger’s terminal diagnosis. It’s simply a fact. Western countries truly have no problems in comparison with Israel and Ukraine. But nobody makes such comparisons while howling in pain. Trying to make people guilty for experiencing pain when “children in Rwanda go hungry” generates no goodwill.
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NYTimes publishes a lot of excellent articles. Recipes, travel, art, etc. This is what makes its propaganda slide down easier. It was hard for me to unsubscribe precisely because I loved the recipes.
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I did not intend to make anyone guilty. Just shared my pov.
Western countries seem like paradise right now.
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No, I know. And I appreciate that you are in a very harsh situation in Israel. You have all my support.
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Thank you. I do appreciate that a lot.
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I wasn’t offended by anything in the opening ceremony, it generally takes a lot to offend me. But I found the whole thing a bit incoherent as an event and mostly boring. A little singing here, a little dancing there, some guy running around on roof tops, athletes on boats, another song somewhere else, more athletes, acrobats, more boats, guy on the roof again, drag queens, more boats, a metal horse on the river, more boats. It didn’t really build and it didn’t really feel like a singular event.
Also, the cauldron with the Olympic flame under a hot air balloon looks dumb. I saw a post online with videos of the best cauldron lighting ceremonies and the ones they chose (Beijing, London, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Barcelona) were all so impressive compared to what they did in Paris.
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Yeah, aesthetically it was incoherent and ugly. I agree, boring and badly organized. It’s like they were trying to be original but failed completely.
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It’s interesting that although I’m a Catholic, the Last Supper parody didn’t feel blasphemous, there’s a lot of parodies of The Last Supper. It felt more kitschy than anything, like a parodic Last Supper that has Elvis front and center instead of Jesus.
The rest of the opening ceremony was just bad taste and incoherent, the headless Marie Antoinette singing Ca Ira, Gojira performing with red confetti, the horse, it just seemed like some sort of weird performance art dreamed up after ingesting magic mushrooms. It didn’t feel as though the ceremony was honoring French culture, it felt like a mishmash of random vaguely French stuff combined with the aesthetics of a Hammer horror film from the 60s. Overall, it was just weird and tasteless and tacky
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Or just told to do something dramatic without any direction as to what point they were trying to make.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2024/08/04/last-words-and-final-feasts/
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The Chinese opening was both beautiful and indicative of why China is hopeless on spite of the population’s high IQ.
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Sure, the Chinese were as regimented as 1930s Germany, but at least they were doing something more original than trying to start WW III, which is more than can be said for Russia.
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It’s almost as if human body performance is only a distraction from the true purpose of these games: to showcase diversity and environmental consciousness.
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Everything is a political billboard these days. It’s very tiresome.
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Also, no ACs in the rooms where athletes are staying lol. “Most sustainable games”
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